Today, any niche market you can think of is crowded with a number of competitors saying their product is better than the others. A potential app user or website visitor won’t waste time on a product that’s confusing to them. For the new kid on the block to stand a chance, he has to make a really strong first impression and offer a well thought out and tested user experience.
A lot of functions that seem cool or intuitive to the designer when designing an app or a website, might be frustrating for the end-user, which is why proper design research and user testing before launching a product is so important. The central principle to optimizing a product for the greatest accessibility is creating user centered design – it’s not how it’s meant to be used that’s correct. It’s how the user wishes to use it. The perfect product needs no instruction manual.
Two faces of User Research
It is true that not every project will require all or most existing methods of user research to be employed. However, each method of user research has diminishing returns, and diversity in research methods leads to additional insight into the customer’s behaviour and expectations.
According to the NN group, user experience research methods can either be attitudinal or behavioural.
The attitudinal aspect of research focuses on finding out what people say or what they believe. This makes attitudinal research useful for marketing and designing promotional content. Research methods that reveal information about user attitudes include card sorts, surveys and interviews.
On the contrary, when optimizing your UX design you’d mainly want to focus on behavioural research. This includes conducting A/B tests, eye tracking and usability tests, which tell us how the user actually interacts with the product, providing us a wealth of data with which to optimize it.
I have curated Effective Strategies for User Testing and Research, which could help you. Hope you like it. This by no means is an exhaustive list of Effective Strategies for User Testing and Research that you could follow.
Strategies for usability testing
1. Start testing early and test frequently
When you put off user testing till the end, and don’t set up your testing process so that it is in sync with development, you’re leaving yourself open to major problems that you may not have time to fix before launch.
Doing user tests on small groups of users more often is better than saving all your testing for a large group in the end. Small groups of five to ten users are often more than enough to point out most significant problems.
Keep your testing process in sync with development flow
Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash
2. Build on your competitor’s product ideas
In the online service development game, the best thing you could do to get a head start is to cheat off your competitor’s metaphorical exam paper. Competing apps, websites and services have been designed with many of the same goals that you have in mind when designing your product.
It makes perfect sense to test a competitor’s service for things they got right, which will give you ideas on what features you need to include in yours. But more importantly, you can give your users a very strong reason to convert to your website or app by addressing your competitor’s weaknesses.
Cheat off your competitor’s exam paper
Photo sourced from: Unsplash
3. Testing User Journeys
With so many methods of user testing available, it can be confusing which ones to prioritize. The ultimate goal of any usability testing however, is to find out what parts of using your product feels unintuitive to your audience. The entire experience of using any product boils down to a set of journeys that a user goes through. This includes actions like looking up menu prices on a restaurant search app, or adding a product to your cart and checking out on an online marketplace.
While participating in a usability test for a particular journey, the user will vocalize their thoughts. This will let you know whether it is easy or frustrating to perform key actions with your product, and allow you to identify areas for improvement.
4. Test Across Platforms and Browsers
The worst mistake to do when you’re developing a website is to leave mobile website testing as an afterthought. Divide your user testing equally between desktop and mobile. When testing a mobile app, ensure that you not only test across iOS and Android, but also across different devices. For example, test both the iPhone and iPad for iOS, and test Android devices from major companies like Samsung, Huawei, and LG so you cover all your grounds.
Similarly, it’s a good idea to test your website on different browsers. Chrome and Safari are the most used browsers right now, but up to 13% of all web browsing is still done on Windows’ default Internet Explorer – and with Mozilla just giving their browser a makeover and a jolt of speed, you can bet a lot of people will be converting to it.
5. Does your product have the right emotional hooks?
Most successful online consumer services have ensured that using their product is addictive and gets first time users to come back to it again and again. Just look at Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. What makes these products so addictive to use?
Consumer psychology consultant and author of best-seller “Hooked”, Nir Eyal describes how winning products get emotional hooks into their users.
All you need is
- A Trigger
- An Action
- A Reward
- An Investment
Make sure to test if your product is emotionally engaging enough and if it isn’t, install some hooks of your own.
Keep users coming back again and again
Photo Sourced from : Unsplash
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